There has been a lot of rumor around the web on how Google is ‘pushing’ their own Google+ profiles in the SERPS. This was originally triggered by Twitter’s first response to Google’s “Search Plus Your World”. Is Google ‘pushing the limits’ or is Twitter overreacting?

We’ve heard some of the experts shed their light on the developments and we will hear more of them tomorrow morning, but we also really want to know how you feel. So let us know your thoughts: who is right here, Google, or Twitter?

To give you a little bit of insight: directly after Google announced the new social updates for the search engine Twitter responded in a pretty direct way by saying:

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google the ‘fired back’ pretty quickly with a short statement by saying:

“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

In addittion: In a short interview Danny Sullivan had with Eric Schmidt he said that other companies like Facebook and Twitter can be treated the same way as Google+ if they are willing to give access to their content.

But what do you think? who’s right, Google or Twitter, let us know in the comments and fill in the poll!

Twitter is right for multiple reasons. Google seems to think social results and Google+ results are the same – they most certainly are not. Twitter and Facebook are the most relevant social results out there for the vast majority of users, and if Google was genuine about showing relevant social results they’d do whatever it took to include those networks in their social SERPs.

But it’s not about improving the user’s experience – it’s about shoving Google+ down our throats in such a way that we don’t have any choice but to use it.

Also, Google’s incredibly lame excuse that Twitter didn’t renew the firehose agreement with Google is of such a low standard I’d spit on the floor if they’d said that to my face. What an incredibly cynical and blatant buck-passing piece of PR spin.

Using only Google+ results is actually damaging relevance – at least at the moment – plus hasn’t Google been trying to display a wide variety of relevant results hence the whole thing about duplicate content getting stripped out of SERPs? Ignoring obvious sites in favour of repeated listings for Google properties contradicts this objective.

Playing around with the new offering this morning was bringing up 7 year old out of date blog posts from MY OWN BLOG (thanks, Google, for showing me something I’m already aware I wrote), Google+ wall posts that happened to have the word(s) in question in them that weren’t particularly useful and was leaving out loads of official sources of information (in case anyone is interested the search terms used were ‘Coachella’ and ‘leather jackets’).

Why I’d want a Google+ post from Matt Cutts mentioning leather jackets or a Google+ post from SEO Book that mentions the word Coachella above news stories of lineup announcements or official Coachella social media pages is beyond me. Pure, unadulterated search was far more useful than the dross Google was churning up in the name of trying to produce something relevant and related. If they’d pulled Facebook and Twitter results it probably would have improved relevance – Google+ simply doesn’t have enough of a history of content yet to be any sort of a decent source for anything.

Malcolm Thomas

Errrrrr… Google?!!

Speaking (probably quite naively, i’m no SEO specialist), they are certainly trying to dominate their market position, but there are genuine alternatives.. Google remains my preference for search, but if the user experience diminishes becasue i have not enveloped myself in the entire Google queen-size duvet, or become frustrated by irrelevent results, i will happily use Bing.

My water supply however can only be supplied by United Utilities, i have no other options.. this irritates me highly!!